Pure CSS Website

Using a solid border for the cursor instead of having it in the text content is a nice touch; because it's separated out you could probably use another animation to get it blinking, too.

archiewood7• 2 years ago

i was kind of messing around with this blinking idea but couldn't get it to render in a way I was happy with

would you use another keyframe or did you have something else in mind

beretguy• 2 years ago

I’m getting 404. Is it because I’m not logged in?

archiewood7• 2 years ago

repo was private, now public!

chris_wot3• 2 years ago

Getting a 404

afiori• 2 years ago

Cool, is the div necessary? Could you style the <link>?

Pesthuf• 2 years ago

Never knew "content" was animatable. This might come in handy some time.

lacoolj• 2 years ago

well it's not hard to believe given that it doesn't seem to have anything but that one paragraph of text and then the animated sentence at the top

am I not seeing something else?

lebean• 2 years ago

I had a similar thought. I thought "wow, believable!" but not to be flippant, the initial wow was genuine.

kypro• 2 years ago

Yeah, that was exactly my thought too, but then I've been doing web dev for 20 years so obviously it wouldn't come as much of a surprise to me that this is possible.

I guess not all people are in the same boat though, and I suppose it is quite cool how much can be done with CSS these days! (not that you would necessarily want to).

treflop• 2 years ago

You could embed JS into CSS in 1999 in IE5 so CSS has always been a lot of "you can do a lot of weird things."

tengbretson• 2 years ago

The ease of dropping in a "useState" and high-ish performance js engines has made high-level CSS wizardry a bit of a lost art.

pimlottc2• 2 years ago

And none of the text is selectable :(

c-hendricks• 2 years ago

Ah so it's more like a pure css mobile app.

danShumway3• 2 years ago

You shouldn't actually build your entire website in CSS -- it's going to be inaccessible no matter what because CSS isn't really for content.

But it's cool to see what's possible, mostly because learning how to overcome these challenges to use a tool in a way it shouldn't be used often requires you to learn more about how the tool works. That the tool is ill-suited is the point.

Of course, not that there isn't value in you pointing out that CSS content isn't accessible :) -- I have seen developers get tripped up by that in production settings particularly when building things like hover labels, so a reminder is always appreciated.

codetrotter• 2 years ago

Noticed the same. Would be interested to know what the page is like for people who use screen readers. Does the whole page seem blank for them?

userbinator3• 2 years ago

Recent Firefox doesn't, but good old Opera 9 lets you select the text just fine. (On the other hand, no animation nor background, but maybe that's a reasonable tradeoff.)

Browser bug? Seems like it's debatable although the spec leans in the direction of generated content being selectable: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24385171/is-it-possible-...

butz• 2 years ago

What's the purpose of remote background image? Tracking?

somishere3• 2 years ago

Pure CSS. Invalid HTML.

Nice job tho. Now just need to make it in 3D.

assimpleaspossi• 2 years ago

I wasn't going to mention the invalid HTML. Thank you for doing it.

xp842• 2 years ago

I thought we all agreed to ignore validity a while back when XHTML gave way to HTML5.

archiewood7• 2 years ago

I cheated for brevity :S

souvlakee2• 2 years ago

If you have browser extensions that make additional div, it looks weird: i.imgur.com/glCfzkj.png

souvlakee2• 2 years ago

Code: https://paste.mozilla.org/BVWPuyrH

Alifatisk3• 2 years ago

First time seeing https://paste.mozilla.org, very cool

psnehanshu• 2 years ago

Consider adding https:// at the start of the URL to make it clickable.

bawolff• 2 years ago

That is pretty cool.

I wonder if you could do this with no <div> using just the <link> tag.

Or do browsers add an implicit body tag if you don't put one that you can style?

Julesman• 2 years ago

A self-closing div is not valid HTML.

yu3zhou4• 2 years ago

Nice work! It’s possible to get rid of even that single div - https://35bytes.maczan.pl/

Alifatisk3• 2 years ago

Yeah I was about to mention that there was no need for the div, the body selector should be enough.

You could even remove the link tag and use the link header in the http response instead https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Li...

xp842• 2 years ago

Thanks loads, I always love a day when I learned something neat, and you’ve made that happen today!!

jkrubin• 2 years ago

awesome. the single div was a performance bottleneck for me.

ape4• 2 years ago

Did you see this in the css

    @keyframes typewriter {
    00.0% { content: "A" }
    00.4% { content: "A " }
    00.8% { content: "A W" }
    01.2% { content: "A We" }
    01.6% { content: "A Web" }
    02.0% { content: "A Webs" }
    02.4% { content: "A Websi" }
    02.8% { content: "A Websit" }
    03.2% { content: "A Website" }
    13.2% { content: "A Website," }
    13.6% { content: "A Website, " }
    14.0% { content: "A Website, i" }
    14.4% { content: "A Website, in" }
    14.8% { content: "A Website, in " }
    15.2% { content: "A Website, in P" }
    15.6% { content: "A Website, in Pu" }
    16.0% { content: "A Website, in Pur" }
    16.4% { content: "A Website, in Pure" }
    16.8% { content: "A Website, in Pure " }
    17.2% { content: "A Website, in Pure C" }
    17.6% { content: "A Website, in Pure CS" }
    18.0% { content: "A Website, in Pure CSS" }
    22.2% { content: "A Website, in Pure CSS." }
}

zichy• 2 years ago

Yes, I opened the CSS file and there it was.

xyst2• 2 years ago

just hardcoded things :)

asciii• 2 years ago

Before it starts to look a bit ugly

div::after { font-family: var(--secondary-font); font-size: 1em; user-select: all; content: " \A \ This website contains one <div> only. \A \ No JavaScript. \A \ The rest is pure CSS. \A \ \A \ The <div> is animated with CSS keyframes, \A \ styled with CSS variables, \A \ styled with CSS transitions, \A \ styled with CSS pseudo-elements, \A \ styled with CSS pseudo-classes. \A \ But that's it. \A \ "; }

mmh0000• 2 years ago

That's impressive. I expected, "Sure, it works, but the CSS is going to be a nightmare." Instead, the CSS is pretty, straightforward and easy to understand.

I love it!

archiewood7• 2 years ago

Thanks - I do honestly think the keyframes are a bit of a nightmare, but they also kind of make the site

corywatilo• 2 years ago

Alternate title: "How to scare an engineer in three words"

xyst2• 2 years ago

lighthouse performance scores are perfect. accessibility fails. best practice category is 90+ (very minor issues). PWA is not applicable.

https://lighthouse-metrics.com/lighthouse/checks/38f2276c-bc...

lol,

egypturnash• 2 years ago

Previous work in this field:

https://mathiasbynens.be/demo/css-without-html - completely empty html, doesn't seem to work on Mac Safari any more, does work on Firefox for me. See https://css-tricks.com/using-css-without-html/ if you want to know how it works.

https://web.archive.org/web/20160420232319/cj-johnson.github... (original copy defunct) - kinda broken now, the source is just a single <link> (if you ignore all the stuff the Wayback Machine adds)

kennedy2• 2 years ago

so clean

tithos• 2 years ago

You can add a bg to the body and and style to the HTML

yerich• 2 years ago

Using pure CSS to make a 3D "game engine": https://keithclark.co.uk/labs/css-fps/

archiewood7• 2 years ago

This is by far the most impressive link in the comments.

chris_wot3• 2 years ago

Might be fun to replace the div tags with a custom tag.

https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/custom-elements.html

vlw• 2 years ago

It's pure CSS so a custom tag will not add any styling a <div> couldn't

chris_wot3• 2 years ago

Yes, but it will preserve semantic markup.

dheera• 2 years ago

CSS is Turing complete, so if you want to make anything you could

Turing_Machine• 2 years ago

Yep. It'd be a fun project to write a compiler for another language that emitted executable CSS on the back end.

superkuh• 2 years ago

Many browser like Firefox support the HTTP header (not HTML header) field for defining external style sheets. You could make a 0 byte HTML page by using this feature in the HTTP response header.

    Link: <//website.css>; REL=stylesheet

userbinator3• 2 years ago

I knew it would be a demonstration of the CSS "generated content" feature.

safety1st• 2 years ago

For reasons that are probably out of scope for CSS, I would really like to be able to do more with the CSS content property.

It's one broad class of problem really: many frameworks make changing the HTML they generate difficult or impossible. Inevitably you end up needing to inject a button or a hyperlinked image or something in a particular position, and you have to resort to Javascript to do something that isn't interactive and isn't a program, which feels like the wrong tool.

You could argue that both Javascript and CSS are the wrong tool for this use case, but CSS would be the more convenient wrong tool.

cyberax• 2 years ago

First single-page applications. Now single <div> applications.

What next? Single letter applications?

calebpeterson• 2 years ago

Single Pixel Applications.

Conveniently abbreviates to SPA.

tiborsaas• 2 years ago

You could have saved that background image and use a CSS gradient ;)

edit: nevermind, that's a dead URL. But anyways, it's an extra http request you don't need.

johnisgood• 2 years ago

I like those! What I would like to see is the source code of CAPTCHAs (that generates the CSS) used by onion websites like Dread. There are CSS-only modals, too.

jraph• 2 years ago

Interesting and well done!

I have an extension that adds a div to the page, Grammalecte, its breaks this website a bit. A div:first-child, or an id would fix it.

A reminder that extensions can affect HTML content and you need to target your elements in CSS in a robust way.

Alifatisk3• 2 years ago

"This website contains one div only"

No, the link tag is there.

amelius• 2 years ago

Waiting for a compiler backend that targets CSS.

phirschybar• 2 years ago

I love this. but, why?

NiagaraThistle• 2 years ago

Do developers really build basic websites / pages WITHOUT pure CSS when it's an option?

I know there are times when you need to do something CSS can't (and shouldn't do of course. But I mean when the 'thing' is design/style only, aren't we all already using only CSS for those things? Or am I just so old I still practice the separation of concerns and no one else is.

Also, while kudos to the OP for doing this, this is exactly a time when using CSS to do this is incorrect and using vanilla Javascript IS the right decision, as this is a behavior and not a style issue.

NB4: Yes I do code sloppy when time dictates, but I still seperate my HTML, CSS, and JS as the norm, not the exception.

spartanatreyu2• 2 years ago

Do developers really build basic websites / pages WITHOUT pure CSS when it's an option?

Yes.

There are developers who have only styled websites using bootstrap classes. (or related css-frameworks, e.g foundation, bulma, etc...)

And there are developers who have only styled websites using tailwind classes. (or other related atomic css frameworks)

Both sets of developers lose out on some very powerful css features (e.g. page layouts using css-grid, container queries, light-dom web components, etc...) that can completely change the way you build websites.

------------------------------------------------------------

Bootstrap developers tend to use bootstrap instead of css because:

- They are entry/minor level front-end developers who are still becoming proficient with css. They tend to use only bootstrap at the beginning, then progressively use it less as their own knowledge improves.

- They aren't front-end developers and are using bootstrap as a crutch to get a front-end out for the system they are building

- They are older front-end developers who have been disincentivized to improve their skills. They have become stuck in a local maxima trap because they're relying on bootstrap to fill a knowledge hole, for example: How to code a responsive design (i.e. bootstrap classes -X> media queries -> reflowing rule based layouts -> container queries), how to build an accessible navigation, how/when to use js to build an interactive component, etc...

- An easy way to spot these kinds of developers is to see if they are:

1. using the BEM class naming scheme because they're coding a div soup instead of using fewer html elements and modern css selectors

2. using a js library to make something when a few lines of css will do the trick

------------------------------------------------------------

Tailwind developers tend to use tailwind because:

- They're using react, which doesn't have a good builtin way to keep component related styles close to the component itself. In css parlance, they don't know how to scope those styles to the component. They only know how to:

1. Put styles in a separate file like in regular page based websites. This method almost always fails because developers will change a style in an external file without realising that it affects more than one component, and they don't have sufficient visual-regression/snapshot testing to catch it.

2. Inline styles to each html element which turns the component into style soup. So they settle on tailwind to make class soup as a shorthand for the style soup. Instead they should be using a framework solution that scopes the css to the component (e.g. vue's `<style scoped>`) or scope the css to the component using web standards, or declare their styles in-component and yse their build system's asset bucketing system to dedupe the declarations.

hmcq6• 2 years ago

page layouts using css-grid, container queries, light-dom web components

Tailwind doesn't "miss out" on any of these css features.

https://tailwindcss.com/docs/grid-template-columns

https://tailwindcss.com/blog/tailwindcss-v3-2

"Light-DOM web components" aren't a CSS feature... and they certainly aren't one that tailwind prevents you from using.

Pure CSS Website

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